From Individual to Empire: A Guide to Building an Authentic and Powerful Brand

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PART I:

The Influencer

–1–

BEYONCÉ’S DUAL ROLE

EXTERIOR: HOME DEPOT PARKING LOT—DAY

The parking lot is bustling with cars moving in and out of spaces and consumers heading for the entrance or pushing shopping carts filled with merchandise.

MOVING SHOT

The camera zooms in on a Bentley, sparkling in the sun, entering the parking lot and pulling into a stall near the back.

CLOSE-UP

On superstar BEYONCÉ KNOWLES-CARTER. She steps out of the Bentley in a form-fitting designer dress, shiny sunglasses, and Louboutin heels.

MOVING SHOT

The MUSIC BED begins to play Run the World (Girls) as Beyoncé struts past the rows of parked cars and enters the store.

INTERIOR: HOME DEPOT STORE—CONTINUOUS

A Home Depot employee in a burnt-orange vest greets Beyoncé with a shocked expression. The MUSIC BED continues.

EMPLOYEE #1

Hello! Can I . . . help you find something?

BEYONCÉ

No thanks.

(continues past the employee with a smile)

MOVING SHOT

Beyoncé continues on her quest through the store, stopping employees and shoppers in their tracks. She doesn’t notice the commotion as she discovers the item she is looking for and heads to check out.

INTERIOR: HOME DEPOT CHECKOUT COUNTER—CONTINUOUS

Again, the employee looks shocked and manages to sputter out her sentence.

EMPLOYEE #2:

Did someone help you today?

BEYONCÉ:

I found what I needed just fine. Thank you.

The checkout process ends, and they exchange pleasantries as Beyoncé walks out of the store. The sun becomes blinding and the screen dissolves to white.

DISSOLVE TO:

INTERIOR: BEYONCÉ’S LIVING ROOM—DAY

We find Beyoncé in an upscale living room. She is screwing in the faceplate of a new light switch dimmer.

CAMERA ANGLE OUT

The room light dims up and down as she plays with the switch on the wall. She smiles and walks over to join her husband and young children on the couch. They snuggle up, lean back, and start watching a movie together.

NARRATOR

Helping independent women everywhere build a more glamorous life.

The Home Depot: More saving. More doing.

FADE OUT

This imaginary commercial, which only exists in my head until someone shares my brilliance with Home Depot’s advertising agency, illustrates two major brands uniting in a partnership that is mutually beneficial. Some may consider this a celebrity endorsement of a corporate brand, but that’s the Don Draper 1960s view of marketing.

Beyoncé is a celebrity and the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. She is also the product that company sells. Beyoncé is a person and a commodity. She’s a brand, and in the twenty-first century, we call her a macro-influencer.

To begin, let’s redefine the existing notion of the term influencer. Online bloggers are not the only influencers. Politicians, musicians, authors, actors, community leaders, clergy, and so many others are major influencers in their arenas and thus earn the title. Celebrities and noncelebrities alike are busy wielding influence over vast populations both on and offline. Consumers in the digital age are becoming more distant from their fellow neighbors, but they still crave and seek out personal connections. Even if relationships with influencers are only one-sided, over a television set, through the radio, or online, the consumer perceives a genuine connection. We will discuss the principles of influence, rhetoric, and how influencers are becoming more powerful than ever before, so that you may develop the skills needed to take advantage of the influencer phenomenon.

Beyoncé, Ellen DeGeneres, Martha Stewart, and Reese Witherspoon are all members of the same club. They are successful entrepreneurs and they are powerful influencers. Over time these women have become macro-influencers across all platforms, with the ability to speak with authority on a wide range of topics. Their stories, and many others I share in this book, will help you understand how they became successful influencers by taking a crucial first step. Every one of these wildly successful women turned inward before they burst out of the starting gate. They did the hard work of figuring out who they are in order to create their unique and powerful brands.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE IS THE BRAND

Influencers don’t achieve their success by accident—ever. For a rare few, the knowledge might be intuitive, but each one understands the concept of branding, even as it applies to themselves. What makes influencer branding unique from traditional branding is that the core product is a real person, not an inanimate object. Sure, a CEO could be emotionally attached to a company or a product, but they are still one step removed. When their product receives harsh criticism or they experience the sting of a failed partnership, it is not a direct hit. In Chapters 3 and 4, I share the secrets of positive psychology that not only help you protect yourself from the ups and downs of the business, but also factor heavily into the creation of your brand.

In my twenty-five-year career branding and marketing celebrity musicians, I have heard this protest countless times: I don’t need branding; I know who I am.

Do not be fooled. You may know exactly who you are, but you still need branding if you’re going to market yourself—your product—successfully. Branding is about presenting your unique characteristics as a commodity. What are you selling? To whom? How will your consumer respond? Self-awareness is the first step to discovering a strong brand identity.

The late Apple founder Steve Jobs once said, Your brand is the single most important investment you can make for your business. I believe this so deeply that I have made it my life’s work to understand the complexities of branding people. I left Sony Music Entertainment after a decade in the marketing and artist development department— working with artists like Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, and Johnny Cash—to focus on helping a new onslaught of independent artists cultivate marketing strategies that could compete with the major record labels with a fraction of the budget.

To my surprise, I found that a solid marketing strategy was not what these artists needed. First they needed branding. They had no idea what key, sellable elements set them apart from the hundreds of others making music. They had no narrative foundation to support a marketing plan, and no amount of money or smarts can create success without one. How can you promote or advertise a product without truly knowing what is being sold?

Imagine a house built on unstable dirt instead of concrete. A weak brand will cause any business to crumble and crash over time and even faster in the face of a storm. So, I set out on a mission to help influencers develop their brand before they made the grave mistake of going public too early or losing valuable investments. Once a faulty product is launched, it can be nearly impossible to correct. I’d give examples, but you have never heard of them. Their names are relegated to music industry oblivion.

Unless you are completely oblivious to contemporary music, you’ve heard of Beyoncé, and this is the reason I’ve made her the star player in our imaginary commercial. If Home Depot approached Beyoncé with a $20 million offer to star in a series of TV spots, her initial reaction could be, Absolutely not. How could you blame her? Home Depot is masculine and gritty. It is blue collar with a do-it-yourself mentality. This is not Beyoncé. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a burnt-orange work vest.

Beyoncé is all that Home Depot is not: She is glamorous and high class and the queen of independent women everywhere. These descriptions are true to her personality and her music. She is a brilliant businesswoman, too. Partnering with a brand that is quite obviously the complete opposite could destroy her authenticity and possibly her entire career. Yes, even if that career is already as solid as Beyoncé’s. Turning down $20 million, while painful, would still be the right decision.

However, if Home Depot refocuses the ad campaign to empower women, things get a lot more interesting. This now becomes a conversation about narrative. What’s the new message they want to relay to consumers? The message in the fictional commercial is that Home Depot can empower women to become more independent. A woman, even a superstar, may be able to hire someone to change a light dimmer, but she doesn’t have to. She may have a man in her life, but she doesn’t need him to fix her problems. She may be wearing designer clothes, but she doesn’t have to get dirty, if, of course, she doesn’t want to. Who runs the world? Girls!

Now this partnership becomes a natural fit because Beyoncé doesn’t have to change who she is. The narratives intersect at an authentic place for both parties. Like Home Depot’s, the Beyoncé brand did not materialize out of thin air. It’s based on a careful analysis of who she is and what she has to offer. For Home Depot, one of the key characteristics of the brand is supporting self-reliance. For Beyoncé, it’s empowering independent women, something she’s been doing since Destiny’s Child. This new partnership reinforces the overall consistency of both brands. So, Beyoncé, go on and get Home Depot on the phone!

BRAND IDENTITY FOR THE INFLUENCER’S BUSINESS

A real, live, breathing person presents many challenges to creating a successful brand, challenges a product-based company simply would not face. There are psychological components that must be addressed and incorporated into an influencer’s brand identity that are nonexistent for a typical product. These forces must help shape the brand as well as grow it over time. Failure to tap into the psychological components at the onset will spell disaster for anyone building a brand.

Influencers must learn to view themselves as a product. They need to be able to step back, remove their personal bias from the equation, and make sound business decisions. McDonald’s golden arches can’t think, and their french fries don’t feel. They have a board of directors who study analytics, make projections, and develop strategies to increase their market share. Influencers, on the other hand, may have a very difficult time separating the creation of their product from the business of getting that product to the consumer. They tend to make shortsighted business decisions based on emotional or personal needs, and that typically leads to disaster. That’s why the first thing a young influencer has to learn is how to distinguish between the self as a person and the self that is a commodity.

Influencers must also be okay with commercializing personal attributes. Public figures must be willing to be vulnerable, sharing their true selves in order to create a connection with their audience. But sometimes an artist’s craft is so personal they don’t want to taint the experience by turning their work into a commodity. In this case, my advice would be to go home and enjoy your work privately, and decide on another career path to pay the rent. For everyone else who doesn’t believe that commercialism equates to selling out, read on, and you will learn how to identify your core brand and how to promote it publicly.

BRAND LONGEVITY

In my experience, outliers (top achievers who don’t operate within society’s so-called norms) struggle with finding purpose, confidence, and even happiness, like the rest of the population. They just tend to be affected on a larger scale due to the added public pressures. Competition is fierce, and pressures mount daily. Knowing and feeling comfortable with an authentic brand tends to help combat these serious distractions. I have found a direct correlation between confidence levels and time and effort spent on branding. This book will help define your unique definition of success and provide focus to achieve your long-term goals.

An influencer’s brand is only as strong and as lasting as their grit, perseverance, and overall well-being. If the CEO of McDonald’s becomes exhausted and burns out, the board will simply replace him or her, and the company will continue churning out Quarter Pounders. If, however, the CEO and the product are intertwined, the product tanks while the CEO is in recovery. The influencer succumbs to the stresses, a bad public narrative ensues, and the influencer fades away, along with the business they built.

Finally, most products don’t have to change over time, but a human has no choice but to evolve. I often see fear in a client’s eyes when I stress the importance of consistency in order to achieve brand loyalty. They feel stifled and pressured by the sudden need for long-term sustainability and wonder how they could possibly be the exact same person every single day for the rest of their lives. They assume consistency means the brand must be perfect at the onset and unchanging, which just happens to be impossible to achieve. Here’s the key that will make all that undue stress evaporate: Evolution does not equal change.

When a brand evolves over time, the core brand remains constant. Since Nike launched the iconic Just Do It campaign in the 1980s, the core brand has not changed. They have maintained consistency. Yes, they have evolved alongside the consumer, modernized their product lines, and updated minor narratives, but their core brand has not changed.

Beyoncé has evolved just like all the other macro-influencers discussed throughout this book. Her musical styling and image have matured, and the themes in her music have become more family oriented as she has become a mother and wife. But her core brand pillars have remained consistent since her first Destiny’s Child album. An influencer must find the delicate balance between consistency for the sake of brand loyalty and evolution for authenticity and sustainability. In Chapter 10 you will learn how to recognize which core elements can be viable for years to come and how to methodically evolve.

If an influencer is armed with an evolution strategy, they may avoid a complete rebrand, although sometimes evolving a brand is not enough. At some point in an influencer’s career, it may be necessary for a rebrand. This process is tedious and expensive and often unsuccessful. External factors, such as competition and the marketplace, and internal factors, such as life experiences and psychological transformations, could make a rebrand unavoidable. Since crystal balls do not reveal this information in advance, influencers must be vigilant to avoid surprises that could result in serious career damage. The tools I give you in this book will go a long way toward helping you avoid a total rebrand down the road.

CREATING YOUR BRAND STATEMENT

The developmental stages of an influencer’s brand require a lot of introspection, analysis, and practice. This can take some time. The process cannot be rushed or forced. But fear not. One day everything will make sense and the aha moment will arrive.

There is also no right or wrong answer; what is right for you may work only for you. We could not build your brand by copying Beyoncé’s because a) it already exists only for her and b) you are a beautiful, exceptional soul that deserves your own moment to shine. In order to pull together all the elements that show off your unique qualities, I will give you tasks to complete as we move along together. Answer truthfully and take your time; no one will see your answers. Only you know if you are being honest with yourself. The objective is to know your brand (yourself) so thoroughly, so deeply, that these exercises will become second nature.